Overtone
jng.imagine27.com
jng.imagine27.com
Seriously though, thanks for posting this. I think music coders deserve special attention because they mix creativity and logic together so well.
I always thought the best moment of 8-mile was when Bunny stops talking and sits down with a pen and a paper in his bedroom. It's fairly explicit that that's the point he starts on the road to being a successful musician.
Something that I found interesting, a video game approach to music: http://kotaku.com/5847212/compose-your-own-musical-villages-...
"Live coding" means you go to a nightclub, hook your laptop up to the sound system and a big projector, and start programming, while everybody is watching you program and listening to the sounds your program is making.
My point was, there's a reason why musicians often use "a box with a bigass row of large physical keys" to do this sort of thing.
That said, a synth costs thousands of dollars; so I love the idea of Overtone making live music more accessible to "dabblers" like me.
( Unfortunately, a MacBook also costs thousands of dollars, and I've given up hoping people still care about Windows. =) )
By contrast, I have the impression that livecoding requires a great deal more knowledge to do in an entertaining way, and it can go wrong in many more ways.
Honestly I was just trying to find some good things to say about Overtone, since creativity is always a great thing and should be encouraged.
Maybe a combination of the two ideas: Overtone functions being invoked by pressing keys on a synth, with pressure/speed of the keypress being passed as function args. (But then I suppose Overtone would be "just another synth generator"... I don't know.)
New instruments provide new means of expression not previously available. That alone is reason enough to keep experimenting and building new instruments, even if most of them never go anywhere or see anything resembling widespread adoption. They expand the palette of possibilities.
If you find a full keyboard strapped to a synthesizer more conducive to what you want to express today, that's fine. There are still guitars, and drums, and harpsichords, and pianos, and analog synthesizers. This doesn't close off those options to anyone, it only opens new doors.
Cost, or being "better" than some other option in some dimension, is not the reason for something like this. New means of expression is the reason, and it is reason enough.
I hate to pick at your example, 'cause I agree with you in spirit. Your harpsichord/piano example was just... Well, exactly my point. The piano was a major improvement over the harpsi; I hope the same will be said of Overtone. That's all.
The process looks more like that of jazz to me - finding/inventing structure & theme, reconceptualising both, collaboratively developing derived forms and then riffing on those for performance.
Unlike songwriting, that's a musical process that's always come naturally to me and I use almost exactly the same mindset when I'm on form as a developer too. I don't know if this a common experience.
I like to think of projects like this as experimentation in technology-as-art. Even if the sound itself isn't what I would use to write songs, I still find it very satisfying to watch someone write out Lisp/Clojure code and hear organized sound come back. And I'm sure that is amplified by a million for the person who actually created this themselves!
In theory a ~compiz composite plugin for this purpose wouldnt be hard to create, if it doesn't already exists. And Qt seems capable of glowing to.. time to patch Konsole.
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/projects-using-fluxus/
And impromptu: http://impromptu.moso.com.au/
My only dislike with increasingly virtual instruments, however, is that I don't really get the same sort of involvement out of using them. I can bang out some fairly decent beats with my PadKontrol but it makes me long for my old, battered drum kit, and the band practices where I'd lay down a beat and just let myself get lost in it all as the guitarists and bassist improvised over it.
What you gain in technology (and all the amazing things you can do with it) you lose in that sense of physicality.
BTW After watching it I've finally submitted my first Ask HN:
What are your music prototyping solutions?
EDIT: this was the library I was thinking of http://mad.emotionull.com/
Are there any overtone-related gatherings in the bay area?
pretty cool, and also started using emacs since then....
Strictly Max/MSP/Jitter is a much more encompassing environment than SuperCollider and ChucK, which focus on audio. The advantage of Max is that it combines a great control language with audio programming, a great video matrix library and a dataflow OpenGL API. Generally there are many more 3rd party contributions to Max/MSP than any of the other media programming frameworks with the exception of perhaps vvvv (which is video centric).
That said, the nice thing about all of these environments is that they heavily integrate OSC messaging, which allows you to mix and match anything together. People often combine openFrameworks/Cinder and SuperCollider for instance.
One of the core goals for Overtone is to provide the means for musicians to share their ideas through a programming-language-like notation. This means readability and understandability are at least, if not more important, to expressiveness with the language.
Overtone should be easy to grok, not appear to be some cryptic puzzle.
The project itself is interesting, but very niche.
The most enjoyable thing in improvisation, are sudden changes that can emerge in a good session. You typically have less than a second to react to such things. That is, less than a second to change rythm/feel, tempo, harmonics, volume, etc. More often than not all at the same time. Playing like that makes you feel part of the organism from which the music emerges, rather than a thinking actor in a rehearsed play. A feeling that I only find in dancing and other things I do with my wife.
I would really like to get into this livecoding stuff, and have tried ChuCK and SuperCollider. Clearly I never practiced enough to improvise in the live, but I'm wondering if it is at all possible in the sense I described above.